More fabric studies. I think this one came out good, I'm glad I got a bit of the translucency on the white cloth. Over all pretty happy with the way this one turned out.

Here is the fourth doctor at three hours. I had some issues with the color and then I realized that my second monitor is having some major color issues so I had to spend about twenty minutes doing some major color correction. I think this is coming along but I'm hoping that by doing more of these I will get much faster.

I think that here I've found the right balance. the figure is drawn in but not to detailed most of my attention was on the drapery and I think that this picture came out good. I still have a lot of work to do but I'm getting there.

So I just ditched the line work and decided to just paint the man. I'm a little rusty when it comes to portraits because this was a lot harder than it needed to be. I think I'll start doing a lot more portraits so that I can really get comfortable with them.

The drawing came out good here but the painting is kind of weak. I got some of the major folds and forms but a lot of the smaller stuff eluded me when it really shouldn't have. I still think that I'm spending to much time of the skin and not enough on the cloth.

So the request was finished and I showed it to the guy and he liked parts of it but his major criticism was that the characters didn't really have much of a resemblance to there video game counterparts. After raging for a few minutes I sat down, swallowed my pride and admitted to myself that he was right, I had dropped the ball in that regard so now I plan to fix that with my next couple of projects. First a painting done from a photo trying to capture the likeness of an individual. I choose Tom Baker the fourth Doctor from Dr. Who because he has a very distinctive look and always has great facial expressions which is another thing that I need to work on. These are the lines after about an hour and a half.

First of a new set. Drapery and cloth have been a weakness of mine for a while so I decided to try and draw them for an hour every day for the next two weeks. The gestures where 60 seconds a piece and I tried to focus more on the clothes and folds than the body, then I did two five minute drawings and finally a half hour study. For the final pose the dress came out alright but the I spent to much time working on the head and face and I didn't even do a good job on them. That's going to be a tough habit to break, I'm so used to focusing on the face and thinking about the rest of the figure second. 

Finished, or as finished as it's going to get. I'm trying to get better at just calling a piece done because I know that I'll never really be happy with it . There are things that I need to work on and I have added them to the ever expanding list of things I need to work on. Overall it's not horrible for my first real painting in a new style  but I still have a long way to go before I reach my goal.

 Squirrels are evil looking. The horrible tiny little eyes, the scary fluffy tail and those tiny little claws. I bravely soldered on with this drawing that I think came out pretty good. There was very little color to work with here because the fur was mostly grey but there was a bit a brown in the grey. After doing animals for a while I've decided to switch gears again and for the next couple of weeks I'll be doing studies of cloth and drapery.

A character from a comic I'm working on with a friend. She's a genetically modified person on the run from an evil government. This was done while I was stuck while working on the comic. Some of these colors might change as I work on the comic.

A frog. Didn't get it looking as shiny as I would have liked but I still like the way he turned out. So these drawings are starting to influence me unconsciously, I was showing some stuff out of my sketch book to a friend and he noticed that I was doing a lot of amphibian based aliens and creatures. The mind of an artist is a strange one.

added some color and some basic light information just to get started. Should be a few more hours before its finished.

 So this parrot was kind of tricky to work on because of all his bright colors. Color is one of those things that I have long struggled with in art and you can see some of that on this blog. When I started posting daily I only did black and white, finally I bit the bullet and started doing things in color with mixed results. But in the last three months I know that I have improved by leaps and bounds as far as color goes and this parrot is proof of that. none of the colors get muddy or look out of place there's reflected color that influences other colors and so on. For 30 minutes I think he turned out really good.

Whooooo Mass Effect fanart! So I got a request from a guy on Deviant art to draw MaleShep and Liara being all romantic. My response was more or less "meh sure why not.". So because it was a request I kind of get to do whatever I want, so I'm trying out my new technique on this one in addition to getting some practice with body language, hands and feet all things that I need to work on. In addition to getting to work on what I want to work on I also get to decide what is meant by "romantic". I decide to draw something most couples do, cuddle and watch a movie.

 A camel. Y'know at a certain point I don't know what to say here because I do these like a week in advance so looking at it now is almost like seeing it for the first time and that makes it kind of difficult to write about. This picture looks okay, not great, but not bad. In the future I might try to do some more camels there kind of strange looking animals.

So I have a project that I'm working on (several actually) but there all kind of an hour or two away from me being comfortable to show them so I'm giving you this instead. Burne Hogarth was an artist, teacher and writer who wrote a bunch of books on anatomy and I own all of them and I plan to copy all of them in the next year (in between my other projects and my job, yeah I'm not gonna sleep much). I think the is through the first ten or fifteen pages and I was still trying to figure out how to copy his stuff quickly while still maintaining a level of quality that would help me learn the anatomy.

 A sleeping fox. Fur is turning out to be a major hurdle for me, I knew that it would be a problem but I wan't aware of how much of a problem until started painting a bunch of it. So I guess that's going on the ever expanding list of shit that I need to work on.

Soooo I know that a while ago I said that I would be posting longer projects as a way of getting myself to get some more portfolio pieces but I feel like I should share this. I was just doodling a figure while watching TRON: Legacy and I just decided to mess around with masks and groups in Photoshop and this is the result.  While its not the most remarkable figure that I have ever done the whole process I went through just felt right . The entire time I was painting this I felt like I was making forward progress which almost never happens to me. It has a comic book feel to it which is good because that's what I want most of my art to look like, even when I'm not drawing comics.

This lion was a bit trickier than I originally thought it was going to be, the body and the legs gave me a lot of trouble  but I think that it turned out okay. Not my best drawing but not my worst either.

It's done! fixed up the hand and added the hair. Spent some time tweaking the bow and adding a glow to the tip of the arrows. There are a lot of things that I would like to fix in this painting but I'm trying to get better at knowing when I'm working on a painting and when I'm just messing with it because I don't know exactly whats wrong. This took about ten hours.

 An adorable little bunny. I made the eye a bit bigger than it was in the photo just to add some cuteness to the bunny, not that it needed much help in that regard.

I made some major adjustments to the hand and the bow in this one. Re-sizing and moving it slightly to be more proportionally correct. I also worked on the bow and added some flowers just to give the ground a bit of variety. Almost done with this one.

 Fishes and other sea creatures. Overall I think that the final picture came out good, there are a few things that I would like to tweak but not to much.

Most of my effort when into the background for a few hours, just getting it tightened up a bit and getting it to work well with the composition. Still a lot of work to go but I'm making progress.

 A bunch of amphibians and reptiles. The final drawing turned out pretty good, I'm not sure if its a frog or a toad (I could never tell the difference) but I like him. His skin looks wet and kind of bumpy although I could have probably pushed the bumpiness a little further.

Here is where I really started to flesh out every thing. I spent a lot of time on Zoya herself for a couple of hours and ignored the background for a while. I painted over the hair that I had drawn so that I could really focus on the face without having to work around the hair. I also adjusted the folds in her dress; still not entirely happy with them and I think that's going to be on of the next things that I work on in my daily studies is cloth and folds.

Some bugs. I had trouble focusing on the final bug because it reminded me of that episode of South Park where they parodied Inception and Stan's dad turned into a butterfly and refused to help Stan. So through out this entire drawing I was thinking of South Park quotes.

I had a good idea of the composition that I wanted when I started this painting and here I'm starting to solidify it. I'm trying to incorporate what James Gurney calls the windmill technique, which is when the center has a very specific relationship to the background, its named after a Rembrandt painting of a windmill. The relationship is like this, light on light (hood and dress), light on dark (scarf thing), dark on light (gloves and hair) and dark on dark (dress).

 A rooster. The feathers where kind of tricky but I think that I got the idea across in the short time I had to work with.

A couple of hours spent adding some basic color, lighting and background. I have a long way to go so I don't have much to say right now.

The website where I'm doing these at (http://artists.pixelovely.com/practice-tools/figure-drawing/) has the animal section sectioned off making it easier to focus on one kind of animal at a time and I decided to do horses. I haven't drawn a horse in ages making this whole exercise very difficult. I think the final pose came out pretty good though; the horse was black but the way the light was reflecting it gave him a blue tint that I accentuated so that the picture would look like I was using color. 

Zoya from Trine 2 which I've been playing recently. I've decided to do longer projects and paintings so I plan on showing the works in progress here as I do them.. This is the line drawing that took around two hours most of which was spent kind of messing around with the pose to get it the way I wanted.

 Cats yesterday and dogs today. This one came out much better than the cat yesterday did, I think that the fur was giving me problems yesterday and I think that this time I got a system that worked out pretty well. With a little more time I would have done the cast shadows to ground him a little more but the dog itself turned out good.

I would've uploaded more pages of my sketch book but its late and I need to scan them, and after working a double I think that I would rather sleep. But there is a bunch of neat stuff on this page. Top left corner more practice with curved perspective, done freehand but I think that I got the point across. Right of that is a bunch of mouths with various expressions, I'm trying to get my faces to be more expressive so I'm trying to practice more. And below that are some bad figures and some portrait that I did on the bus. Drawing on the bus can be a bit difficult.

 I don't draw a lot of animals so I decided to do a couple weeks of gesture drawings of animals and I started with some cats. The final pose here came out a little cross eyed and the body isn't as far along as I would have liked but this was my first attempt at painting a cat and for a first try this isn't so bad.

A portrait of Despair from the Sandman comics. I think that she kind of got the short end of the stick in those comics. She seems like an interesting character but she was never to vital to the story and never really got much time in the spot light. This took a while to do but I'm not sure how long.

 So this is my last male figure for a while and I think that it show some definite improvement over the first couple I did. Not perfect by any stretch of the imagination but I think that I'm moving in the right direction. I would have like to get to the face but I ran out of time.

 I overheard somebody mention a cigarette smoking monkey while I was watching TV so I decided to draw a cigar smoking ape. Not really sure why but I did. next to that is a very quick study of my sisters dog and below that is a sketch I did while waiting at the bus stop.

A bunch of quick sketches that I did for a character that's in a comic I'm working on with a friend. It's been a while since we've worked on it so I'm trying to get the character down again.

I think the arms, torso and upper leg came out pretty good. There are some spots that could use some work but overall I'm pretty happy with it.

A bunch of quick studies for a bunch of Islamic buildings. Going clockwise Byzantine, Islamic, Tunisian, and Islamic again, I think. I'm not 100% sure of all of these classifications. They took about 45 minutes a piece and overall I think they came out alright. I got distracted by work so I didn't post yesterday so I'll be posting again later today.

 So I tried my hand at an older figure. It presented a bit of a challenge because of the way skin folds on an older person. There are also some color differences that I tried to highlight. This figure was a pain to do because of all these different things that I tried to keep in mind at the same time. I think that spending another twenty minutes would have made this a much better figure, that said I did learn a lot from this figure.

 So just couple of random sketches. An evil snow man at the top, a male face in the middle, and a female alien at the bottom. On the right an unfinished sketch of a woman drawing some kind of weapon.

Bus stop sketches. Some times I can't think of any thing to draw so I just start to draw whats in front of me. I was stuck on the bus for a while because of traffic so I was able to put more detail into the drawings than I normally would have.

So this figure is less well defined so I was able to put more time into painting the figure and less time defining muscles. That said I still think this figure could have used an extra ten minutes and it would have been really good. 

A quick painting of Eris the goddess of chaos. This could use some more work but I kind of like it and might work on it some more in the future.

 So I think that I'm getting better at painting and drawing well defined muscles. This guy came out pretty good, still I have a lot of room for improvement but I think that I'm moving in the right direction.

Some more gestures done while on my way to work. The three closest to the bottom where done from people on the bus, the others where done from my head and I made the one on the top left an asari from Mass Effect.

More gestures all of these where done from my imagine and I didn't include any interesting characters on this page. 

Again the well defined muscles took up most of my time leaving me little time to refine the colors. The muscles came out good but the way I have the colors now kind of distracts from that.

This guy was fun to paint, I liked his facial expression and clothes. I took a little over an hour to do and I'm pretty happy with the results.